The grandmother comes every morning with a picnic basket filled with the day's food and interrogates the children about their modesty and piety, questions the children are too innocent to fully understand. Only in the attic are they free to play.Ĭathy and Chris attempt to make the best of the situation by decorating the attic with paper flowers to create an imaginary garden for the twins. The grandmother believes the children are 'the Devil's spawn' and is obsessed with the idea of incest, forbidding all contact between opposite sexes, while prohibiting the children from making noise or opening the room's windows. The grandmother forces Corinne to reveal to her children that the reason for her disinheritance was that Christopher was Malcolm's younger half-brother, and thus Corinne's half-uncle, and that the children are the products of incest. She assures the children that they will only be in the room for a few days.Īt Foxworth Hall, Corinne's mother (called only 'the grandmother') locks the children in a bedroom connected to the house's large attic. Because Malcolm is unaware that Corinne had children by her marriage to Christopher, the children must hide in a secluded upstairs room of the enormous Foxworth Hall until Corinne can break the news to her father. Now the elderly Malcolm is dying of heart disease, and Corinne intends to return to her childhood home of Foxworth Hall in Virginia to win back her father's affection in time to be reinstated into his will. On the verge of their home being foreclosed, Corinne reveals to the children that as a young woman, her marriage to Christopher so offended her multimillionaire father Malcolm Foxworth that he disinherited her. is killed in a car accident, leaving Corinne deep in debt with no means to support her children. In 1957, the Dollanganger family-father Christopher, mother Corinne, 14-year-old Chris, 12-year-old Cathy, and 5-year-old twins Carrie and Cory-live an idyllic life in Gladstone, Pennsylvania, until Christopher Sr. The book was extremely popular, selling over forty million copies world-wide. The novel is written in the first-person, from the point of view of Cathy Dollanganger.

It is the first book in the Dollanganger Series, and was followed by Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, Garden of Shadows, Christopher's Diary: Secrets of Foxworth, Christopher's Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger and Christopher's Diary: Secret Brother. Flowers in the Attic is a 1979 Gothic novel by V.

Petals in the attic series